Surprisingly, many of the lessons I've learned over the years have little to nothing to do with designing buildings. That doesn't mean they weren't worth learning.

Reflection

Sunday, August 31, 2014

Oh Captain, My Captain

William Arthur Ward said, “The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to
change; the realist adjusts the sails”.
If one considers our clients, bosses or colleagues as the captains of
their respective ships, it is obvious which captain would be most desirable to
serve.

The pessimist can act in a number of ways under duress. Probably the first reaction from these types
of personalities is to assign blame before fully investigating the
problem. This is probably because
pointing fingers is so much easier than rolling up your sleeves and looking for
solutions. Sometimes so much time is
wasted in the blame game, both by the act of blame and then the obligatory
defense of those blamed, that the problem can spiral out of control. One only has to think back to a hurricane
named Katrina to support this theory.

The optimist is too quick to throw in the anchor. Inaction is their course of action, with the
expectation that higher powers will set them on the right course eventually. While the winds are blowing, the safe thing
in their minds may be to sit tight. This
may be the right thing to do in a typhoon (think if Gilligan and the Skipper
had dropped anchor during that three hour tour), but when in competition with
other ships, this inaction may -put too much space between you and your rivals.

The realist takes a good, hard look at the wind and adjusts
their course of action with their original destination in mind. Blame becomes irrelevant and the thought of
stopping never crosses their mind. I
think back to Apollo 13, when the astronauts’ vessel did not have enough power
to return to Earth, the crew used the gravity of the moon to sling shot it back
home. Hundreds of people pulled together
with the common goal to get Tom Hanks and those other two guys home.